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Paul Graham on great hackers

Posted Jul 29, 2004 20:05 UTC (Thu) by davidw (subscriber, #947)
In reply to: Paul Graham on great hackers by allesfresser
Parent article: Paul Graham on great hackers

I don't think Perl is growing as quickly as it used to be. In the late 90'ies, it seems, it was probably *the* open source programming language, after C. Remember when mod_perl was a happening web technology? I think Java and PHP blew it out of the water (the web).

Of course it's still useful, and I really like Paul's comments, but I think Perl is not really the standard to judge by any more. The most popular language right now is probably Python.

But there is a huge amount of pressure to use Java for everything. They have managed to get a brand that open source languages don't have, and they have a ton of installed code at this point. Libs, courses, books, and so on. Of course, Paul's right, it tends to be a language that tries to keep stupid people from making mistakes in a large group, rather than helping out the clever ones.

And meanwhile, here I am with Tcl... which I still think is a brilliant concept as far as a language. Don't tell me marketing doesn't matter, because bad marketing has hurt Tcl a lot.

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Paul Graham on great hackers

Posted Jul 30, 2004 1:51 UTC (Fri) by lm (guest, #6402) [Link]

> And meanwhile, here I am with Tcl...

There are some efforts ongoing to try and fix the tcl/tk problem. Take a
look at http://tktable.sourceforge.net/tile/ and see if you like that
better. It ought to breath some life into tcl/tk as a toolkit.

We use tcl/tk at BitMover (and we're actively looking for more developers
who are local to the SF Bay Area, hint, hint) and we're looking at ways of
evolving the tcl language to make it more approachable to the average
programmer. We're looking at adding per object (command) anonymous
arrays (i.e., every object has an $widget array get foo and we'd like to
add a -> operator so you can do $widget->foo to mean $widget array get foo).
Other ideas include C style scoping rules so you can do

scope {
proc I_am_a_global proc {
}

private proc I_am_visiable_only_in_this_scope {
}
}

perl style regular expression so you can do

if ($var =~ /*.o$/) {
}

$var =~ s/junk/JUNK/

and we're wrestling with some sort of reasonable string/list indexing
that is shorter than

set elem [list index $list 5]

If we can fix the parser to support this I'd love to be able to do

set elem $list[5]

(we've toyed with $list<5> which would be easier to implement but looks
pretty weird).

Anyway, tcl/tk isn't dead and we're working hard on making sure that it isn't. If you are interested in this sort of thing send me mail, I'm lm <at> bitmover.com.

Paul Graham on great hackers

Posted Jul 30, 2004 8:30 UTC (Fri) by davidw (subscriber, #947) [Link]

Tcl is far from dead, but it has an image problem. The technology is very, very solid stuff (large portions of the Tcl core are very nicely written C code) with a great idea behind it (a small repurposeable and extremely flexible scripting language). The problem is that there are negative perceptions about it in the open source world, and as a consequence, it has little "buzz". While this in and of itself doesn't matter, what matters a great deal is attracting new blood and people with innovative ideas to your platform, because of the network effects.

Image problems also matter to those who sell services based on something. It's pretty easy to find work doing Java (even if, as Mr. Graham puts so well, it's crappy work), but much harder to find Tcl jobs, or even sell products based on it. Word on the street is that you too have caught flack from customers who would prefer to see BitKeeper's GUI in Java instead of Tk, even though Java is no more native looking than Tk (as opposed to something like wxWindows).

Paul Graham on great hackers

Posted Jul 30, 2004 7:19 UTC (Fri) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]

Last time I looked, there were a lot more Perl than Python jobs advertised on the newsgroups. I think Perl is still far more popular than Python overall, with Python probably more popular amongst open source developers and perhaps Linux users writing new code.

Paul Graham on great hackers

Posted Jul 30, 2004 8:20 UTC (Fri) by davidw (subscriber, #947) [Link]

Sure, and there will be Perl jobs out there for a long time, lots of new projects written in Perl, and many happy Perl users in general.

That said, I was talking about what I feel the trend is, which is away from Perl, towards Python, and in the web world, towards Java and PHP.